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State v. Davis4/1/2005
The statute reads "any . . . warrant . . . in any criminal prosecution." Criminal prosecution has concluded when an accused is adjudicated guilty and is sentenced. This appellant has been prosecuted and convicted. Sentence was imposed. In the context of Tenn. Code Ann. § 40-6-206, criminal prosecution does not encompass warrants issued for execution of sentence after a defendant is convicted.
Id.
The defendant argues this holding is not applicable to the present appeal because of their perceived factual differences. The State disagrees, asserting that both cases present "the very same factual situation," because in both the capias was issued after the defendant had pled guilty and the court had "rendered the sentence" but had not yet "executed the judgment." We will review these arguments.
In Allen, the defendant had been sentenced and execution was delayed until a court setting the following month. He did not appear at the subsequent setting, and a capias was issued four days later. The opinion does not reveal whether the trial court had entered the judgments when the defendant pled guilty or whether this was reserved until the execution date. However, it appears that the capias was issued in that case because of the defendant's failure to appear at the next case setting, not because of "service of a sentence and violations of probation," as the defendant in the present matter has characterized. Subsequently, the holding in Allen was relied upon in Tennessee Attorney General Opinion No. 02-126 (2002), opining that Tennessee Code Annotated section 40-6-206 does not cause probation violation warrants to expire after five years. We conclude that the facts in Allen do not differ from those presented by the present appeal and, procedurally, the cases cannot be distinguished. Likewise, we disagree with the present defendant's related view that her legal posture was the same as if she had been indicted but never arrested. This claim ignores the fact that the court's minutes of June 4, 1992, recite that "the defendant says she is guilty of Driving Under the Influence " (emphasis in original) and that she waived her right to a jury and the constitutional monetary limit on fines. The minutes then recite that the court found the defendant guilty of DUI and pronounced her sentence:
he Court finds that the defendant is guilty of Driving Under the Influence , as charged in the lst Count and fixes the punishment at 11 months and 29 days in the Knox County Jail with the percentage of 75% to be served before the defendant is eligible for Release Classification Status and a fine of $250. This is a Class A Misdemeanor. Judgment is reserved until September 24, 1992. The defendant shall report to the Hamblen County Jail on June 4, 1992 to serve 46 hours of the sentence.
We are persuaded by the analysis in Allen, 1995 WL 764996, at *1, that Tennessee Code Annotated section 40-6-206 is intended to be "a housecleaning measure to unclog the computers and rid the justice system of stale, unserved, unadjudicated cases." Likewise, we conclude, as did Allen, that this statute does not provide refuge to a defendant who has been adjudicated guilty and sentenced, as this defendant was on June 4, 1992. Tennessee Code Annotated section 40-6-206 does not cause a capias, issued under these circumstances, to become void after five years. Accordingly, we conclude that the trial court erred in declaring in 2002 that the October 23, 1992, capias had expired and, thus, was void. The defendant's arrest and sentencing, pursuant to that capias, were lawful.
II. Right to a Speedy Trial
In reviewing this claim, we first will determine the cause of the lengthy delay betw
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